‘Stand back!’ shouted Brian, ineffectually trying to shoo the inmates away. ‘There’s nothing to see here!’

The inmates ignored him, jostling for position, trying to get a better look.

‘Fuck me!’

‘Holy shit!’

‘Is that Sharon?’

There was a retching sound as one of them threw up.

Bailey looked at Toni and the others as they craned their heads to take it all in. They seemed just as surprised as she was. Her mind raced, reassessing everything she’d come to believe up until this point.

Sharon had quite obviously been scalped, yet the gang appeared to have had nothing to do with it. When this had occurred, they had been upstairs with her getting scolded by Amber. Likewise, Terry couldn’t have done it because he was in police custody.

It begged the question – who had done it? If the perpetrator of this crime was the same one who’d killed the others, then she’d have to re-evaluate her entire theory around who’d murdered Alice.

She peered closer and noticed that something was scrawled crudely in blood on the steel door of one of the cupboards close to Sharon’s head. It seemed that her dying act had been to write something in her own blood, hence her outstretched arm and fingers.

Bailey pushed her way to the front of the crowd and bent down to take a closer look. Four letters, jagged and uneven, but legible all the same.

First, the vertical line and two crossbars of a capital ‘F’. Next came the straight downward slash of an ‘l’, the tail of which then jerked sharply to the right to become the inner curl of a shaky lower-case ‘e’, itself followed by a separate, even wobblier lower-case ‘e’.

‘Flee,’ she murmured, forming the four letters into a word.

Amber noticed what she was looking at. She knelt down on her haunches and squinted at it in puzzlement.

‘Flee? What does that mean?’

‘It’s almost like… like some kind of warning,’ said Bailey.

The sight of that single word sent a chill through her. There was something deeply ominous about this stark and fatalistic call to action.

Flee.

Get out of here now.

There is no hope.

Just get out while you can.

Unfortunately, most of them didn’t have that option.

Bailey was starting to get the nasty feeling that there was a whole other dimension to these murders, something much darker and more frightening than she had previously been aware of.

Chapter 64

The mournful opening piano arpeggios of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ tinkled away down the earpiece of the phone.

‘Hello, Bailey,’ said Frank, the music cutting out. ‘I’m glad you called.’

Bailey opened her eyes.

‘She was my cellmate, you know.’

‘Who?’

‘Sharon Finn. The one who just got scalped.’

‘Oh… I’m sorry.’

‘I wasn’t close to her. In fact, I didn’t really like her one bit. And I think she was onto me. I guess I should almost be glad that she’s no longer a threat in that respect. But I wouldn’t wish her fate on anyone. It was pretty unpleasant.’